Get Yourself Star Trek Computer Sounds

Star Trek fans are usually technology fanatics. This stems from the fact that if you grew up when any “generation” of Star Trek episode was on, then you quickly became obsessed with the cool gadgets that the Star Trek crew carried and used throughout the ship (or on planets). Now that the world has progressed with tremendous technological advancements, many of those technologies are now a reality. Just last week, I had my temperature scanned with a probe that the nurse simply ran across my forehead. I had to double check to make sure I hadn’t just entered the Enterprise sick bay. And then, I grinned… Star Trek is here.

Unfortunately, when it comes to our cell phones and computers, the cool sounds that came along with those old Trek gadgets simply never became a reality. Our computers beep and alert using all of the standard operating system sounds, our phones ring or buzz in various ringtones – but what ever happened to those cool Star Trek sound effects that our “communicators” are supposed to have? We’ve achieved some of the Tricorder technology with our GPS gadgets but where are the metallic beeps and chirps? MakeUseOf has always offered some of the best sound resources for readers, such as a FindSounds, or a review of the Soungle – free sound effects website. While Star Trek sounds are certainly hard to find and exist only in some of the most obscure places on the Internet – today, I offer MakeUseOf readers a few useful sources for Star Trek computer sounds.

If you’ve been a Trekkie for years, or you just became a new member of the Trekkie community after the last film, you’ve probably learned pretty quickly that finding funky sounds for your mobile phone or your computer isn’t exactly the easiest task in the world. If you perform a Google search, you’ll quickly discover that most of the best files are buried deep in someone’s web server archive. For some reason, many of the Star Trek fans don’t seem to be the most advanced webmasters, so quite a few of these sites are hard to navigate. The following list offers some of the coolest Star Trek computer sounds, movie effects and even audio quotes that most Star Trek fans will immediately recognize from their favorite Star Trek generation. Without further ado, let’s “Make it so.”

These are mostly a collection of various short computer sound effects from the various Star Trek series. One of my favorites is the Torpedo; but dooropen, Communicator and Incoming Message are also great for different functions of a Windows Mobile device, like an incoming email message or an appointment due. There aren’t many options for ringtones here, but when you’re done downloading all of these sound effect, your phone will be transformed into a device that will probably turn a few heads.

Composer Juan Portela Shares His Love of Star Trek

While digging through various forums and obscure web sites for some of the best Star Trek sound effects, I came across a link to a ZIP file, hidden within the website of composer Juan Portela. Oddly, I couldn’t find a single link to this file from his actual site, but the link from a forum post worked great. Clicking on the link will immediately open the ZIP file. After extracting it, you’ll have a selection of 9 awesome “alert” sound effect files that you can use to totally trick out your PC’s various sounds such as errors, email messages, just about anything else.

I’ve used a few of these on my own computer – I think in terms of Star Trek computer sounds for various Windows alert events, this collection is perfect. These are essentially various sound files which Juan edited mostly from the airlock sounds. I’ve set all of my appointment settings to use these sound files whenever an alarm is due, and I still grin every time it goes off. After a while, you’ll feel like you’re living in the middle of your favorite Star Trek episode.

Download Star Trek Ringtones from CellSea

Personally, I’ve found the best mobile phone ringtones and sound effects just by doing a search for “Star Trek” on CellSea. Just a few examples from the list of free ringtones available there include the Enterprise computer voice saying “Command Functions are offline,” a ringtone made from communicator beeps, and even one made from the Star Trek TNG main theme song.

After listening to the Star Trek TNG and experiencing a lot of great childhood memories flooding back – it’s now my new mobile ringtone. This assumes that you can use MP3 ringtones on your phone, as that is the format of most of these. Obviously, since they are MP3 files, you can use all of these awesome Star Trek sound files for your computer sound effects as well.

Hundreds of Star Trek Computer Sounds at the SoundBoard

SoundBoard is probably one of the best sources for Star Trek sounds that I’ve seen. A search for “Star Trek” at SoundBoard results in two pages of results. Each of those results features about a dozen tracks or so of some of the best Star Trek sound bites or sound effects that you’ll find anywhere.

The SoundBoard features this very cool player that lets you test out all of the tracks within each category before you download it to your computer.

If you’re looking for Star Trek WAV files, a fan from the UK created a “Matt’s Movie Sounds” page, and there’s an entire collection of over fifty audio quotes from the original series as well as The Next Generation. Another obscure source of Star Trek sounds is Frank’s Radio, where there’s a directory of over 100 Star Trek WAV files that include computer responses, beeps, sound effects and quotes.

Do you know of any other valuable resources for Star Trek sounds? Share them with other Trekkies in the comments section below!

Jon

Juan Portela

Juan Portela

November 4, 2009

Here is the link – I put it up on my Web server because I had nowhere else to host it at the time. I took it down some time ago, only to be met with a bunch of emails from people asking me to put it back… funny.